


The Children's Ward

by spiderfire



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Gen, Missing Scene, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), death of children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-18 19:36:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8173456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderfire/pseuds/spiderfire
Summary: It started out as a routine investigation.  It ended in a massacre.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> Based on the cut scene from CA:TWS - 
> 
> Alexander Pierce: "If you do this, none of your past will remain hidden: Budapest, Osaka, the children's ward. Are you sure you are ready for the world to see you as you really are?"

The building was still a tangle of steel girders, pressing into the sky. The muted sound of blaring car horns and warbling sirens drifted upwards, but mostly what Natasha heard was the whoosh of the wind. The wind tugged at her clothes and whipped her red hair into a tangle, but she ignored it. She perched on a beam with her feet dangling over empty space. 

Almost directly below her was a patch of green, a tiny park in the midst of the grey city. Dozens of specks moved around in the park, chasing each other and going from one plaything to another. There was one dot, larger than the rest, that moved slower. From this vantage point, she could not make out the wheel chair or the red curly hair, but she knew they were there. 

There was a vibration in the beam and she looked up expecting to see Clint casually walking along as if he were on a sidewalk, but it wasn’t. Her eyes widened when she saw him. He was picking his way carefully, placing his feet in the dead center of the metal girder. The last time she had seen the Winter Soldier, he had been trying to kill her. He had been single-minded. Driven. Now, that was gone. He wore a green shirt and a hoodie. His shoulders were hunched. He looked worn. Tired. 

He lowered himself onto the beam, making each movement deliberately. “I hate heights,” he said once he was settled. 

“What are you doing here?” she asked. 

“I could ask you the same thing,” he said. 

She looked down at the kids playing in the park and then back at him. “Steve’s been looking for you,” she said. 

“I know.” He wore gloves, but even so, she could tell that his hands were clenched tightly on the edge of the beam. “Are you going to tell him?” 

“Tell him what?” 

“That you saw me.” 

She shrugged. “Depends,” she said. “You here to finish what you started?” 

He frowned at her. “What do you mean?” 

“You’ve tried to kill me twice.” 

“Just twice?” he asked. 

She frowned back at him, wondering what that meant. 

“What’s your connection?” he asked, nodding at the park below. 

Natasha looked down again, remembering the way the flames had engulfed the entire wing of the hospital. The fire had spread far faster, far further than she had expected. That day she had just turned her back and run. Now she heard the screams, the pleas, the wailing sirens, the muffled explosions that reverberated through the ground and the terrible roar of the flames that she had blocked out for so long. 

“Can you see the girl in the wheel chair? The redhead?” 

****Some years ago****

Natasha always found Fury’s office in the Triskelion to be disorienting. The Soviet spy agencies favored windowless rooms that interconnected in a maze-like tangle. In the nicer facilities, there were courtyards, closed in on all sides by stone. Even the ground was covered in paving stones, as if to keep the worms themselves from overhearing their secrets. Fury’s office could not be more different. The Triskelion was a mammoth tower, right in the heart of Washington DC, a startling structure of glass and steel. Fury’s office was spacious, airy and all windows. It was a throughly American design. Over-sized. Over-confident. Over-done. 

Fury was sitting behind his desk, his feet propped up on the shining surface, a tablet balanced across his knees, as she walked into the room There was not a scrap of paper to be seen. He looked up as she entered. “Ah, Agent Romanof,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

That was another thing that Natasha found disorienting about Americans. Fury was her superior. Why would he thank her when he had ordered her to come? 

“I came as soon as I could,” she replied. 

As she took a seat across from him, he dropped his feet to the floor and slid a different tablet across the desk at her. “How is Agent Barton?” Fury asked as she picked it up. 

She shrugged. “Haven’t heard from him, sir. He’s on his honeymoon.” She ran her thumb across the tablet and it recognized her print. “What is this?” she asked as the briefing materials, organized in several folders across the screen, popped into view. 

“I want you to investigate a series of pharmaceutical thefts.” 

“Sir?” 

“NASA’s Glenn Research station report that a several shipments have been intercepted.” 

“Isn’t that more appropriate for local law enforcement? Or military police?” 

“Not this time,” Fury said. 

“What are they stealing?” 

Fury tapped at his pad and hers lit up showing a list of chemicals. None of them meant anything to her. “On this list are several biotransgenic compounds,” Fury said. 

“Biotransgenic?” 

“They cause mutations. Most of the time, the mutations are harmful to the subject, or it is even fatal, but there have been cases…” 

“Super soldier serum,” Natasha said. 

“Something like that,” Fury replied. “I want you to find out who has this unauthorized little science experiment going on, and I want you to stop them before they get results.” 

“Do you know why Glenn is getting this stuff to start with?” 

“I have another agent working on that,” Fury said. 

She glanced back down at the pad. There had been rumors during her training, of course. Rumors that the girls had been given treatments, rumors of soldiers kept deep in Siberia who were no longer even human. She had no idea if any of that was true - she was certainly faster than the typical agent, stronger than the typical agent, but it was nothing that seemed beyond plausible. 

She looked up at Fury. “Consider it done.” 

***

Her own office was far less expansive than Fury’s. Up three levels and in the next tower over, the window faced the interior of the Triskelion, giving her a grand view of the other two towers. She shared the room with three other junior agents, but she did not work the sort of jobs they did. They worked on teams with senior agents and junior agents, techs and specialists. Her position was different. 

STRIKE team Delta was her team. It was not much of a team at that. Just her and Clint Barton, and with Clint off on vacation with his new wife, it was just her. Just the way she liked it. Kicking off her shoes, she put the tablet on her desk and picked up the VR headset and gloves. She flung her hands wide, activating the display and suddenly the room was full of information. Videos, fragments of phone calls, receipts, pictures. 

The VR data display was not her favorite way to work, but it was a good way to get started. Later she would take off the headset and gloves and switch to more old fashioned techniques, but for now, it let her get a big picture, quickly.

Hours later she had what she needed. A city: Cleveland. A name: Albert Latimer. She pulled up her email and sent a message off to Fury before she headed to the airport. 

*****

Latimer worked at Central Hospital, a sprawling mansion in Shaker Square that had once housed a clinic for Civil War veterans. Now, its grounds and colorful Victorian architecture was home to a long term care and recovery center. It was hard to see what a place like this needed with compounds like akly-tetrocine-15.

The hospital was surrounded by a towering wrought iron security fence. There was a gate for vehicles and a human sized gate. With her hair done in a braid and a cardigan draped over her shoulders, Natasha pressed the buzzer at the door for admittance.

“Yes?” the tinny speaker said.

“My name is Sally Crenshaw,” she said into the speaker. “I am here to visit my aunt.”

The gate clicked open. “Proceed to the front desk for your visitor badge,” the speaker said.

Natasha walked through the gate and onto a gravel path. Her sneakers crunched. The gravel path wound through a flower garden, on the way to the grand front door. The flower garden was full of yellows and oranges, the color of fall. She took her time, meandering through the gardens that circled the house. In the gardens behind the mansion, she found a small playground with swings and monkey bars and a slide, neatly surrounded by perfectly layered mulch. It did not look like the playground got much use, but, she supposed, it was a hospital. She finished her circuit and went up to the front door.

The foyer had a grand staircase that circled around the perimeter of the open space. Overhead a glittering chandelier cast rainbows on the walls and floor. The receptionist sat at a simple desk facing the door. He looked up from his newspaper as she entered. “Ms. Crenshaw?” he said.

“Yes.”

He pushed a ledger towards her. “Please sign in. I was getting worried you had gotten lost.”

“The gardens are lovely,” she said as she scribbled Sally’s name. “I have never been here before.”

The receptionist took the book back. Reading her name off the ledger, he filled in a large white sticker that said VISITOR in big blue letters. “I hope your aunt is having a good day,” the receptionist said as he held out the sticker.

She took the sticker and smiled at him. “Thank you.”

“Room 47,” the receptionist said. “Go up the stairs, turn right, and then right again. Room 47 is down the hall. You can’t miss it.”

She laughed, “I am sure I will be fine,” she said. “Thank you.”

Natasha went up the grand staircase. At the top she turned right. And then left. And then she found another staircase and went down and she walked along another corridor.

Nothing looked suspicious. The halls were mostly quiet. Nurses came and went, pushing patients out of their rooms and into spacious solariums. Patients sat in the sun or played cards or watched TV. It all seemed very pleasant. While she was wandering, she found a hallway with doors that had nameplates for doctors. Doctor Latimer was the third office, but his door was closed and voices mumbled on the far side. She decided to come back and check it out later.

Then she heard one nurse say to the other, “Can you take room 14 for me? I have to cover for Sheila in pediatrics.”

She followed the nurse down a level. The corridor she found herself in was a stark contrast to the ornate Victorian woodworking above. The walls were plasterboard painted a tedious green. The doors were metal and unmarked. The nurse passed several doors before she paused in front of one and entered a number on the keypad. She opened the door, passed through and the door clicked shut behind her.

Natasha watched from her vantage point under the stairs. After the nurse had disappeared, she noticed that the first door at the base of the steps had been left propped. Inside, Natasha found a laundry facility. She ditched her cardigan in a hamper and pulled a clean set of purple scrubs from a dryer.

Shedding the Sally Crenshaw personality, Natasha approached the third door. Her pocket scanner showed her that the numbers on the keypad that got touched were 4, 5, 7 and 9. She started trying combinations. On the third try, the door clicked open. 

****

The door opened into another hall. Half a dozen doors - one on the left and five on the right led off the corridor. The one on the left was labelled “ward”. On the right there was one with no knob and crash hinges. It was labelled O.R. Two doors down from the O.R. was one labelled “training”. The hall ended in an open space with a small table, a fridge, a microwave and a sink. A box cookies had been left on the table.

At several places along the hall, there were red panic buttons installed at head height.

As she passed the second door, she heard voices. She paused outside the door to listen, but she could not make out what was being said.

A door behind her opened. She quickly straightened started to walk down the hall, when a woman’s voice demanded, “What are you doing here?”

Turning slowly to convey confusion, a lie on her lips about being sent down to fill in since they were short staffed, she saw a slight woman with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, wearing a lab coat. The lab coat had the name “Dr. Washington” embroidered on the chest.

Dr. Washington reached up to hit one of the red buttons. As soon as Natasha realized what Washington was trying to do, she bolted and headed for the door, but she was too late. She heard the bolts click into place an instant before she slammed into the door.

It took her a beat to recover. She heard an alarm sounding, but it is not in the hall. It is in one of the rooms nearby. She spun around, her back to door. Dr. Washington retreated several steps up the hallway. One of the doors along the hallway opened and several guards dressed in black boiled out, filling the space between her and the doctor.

Natasha took inventory. She had the Widow Bites on her wrists. That’s it. She stepped away from the door and set her feet. She could handle the half dozen barely trained clowns facing her.

And then she felts a sting on her arm. She touched the spot and a dart came loose in her hand. The dart fell from her fingers as her knees buckled. The world faded to black. 

*****

Natasha opened her eyes in a room that was bright and white. She tried to move but she founds that she was belted to a hospital bed, halfway between prone and sitting. Two broad straps held her firmly to the bed.

She looked around the room. It was empty. White walls. A white floor. A white ceiling. In the corners where the ceiling met the walls, black cameras with red lights stared down at her.

A door opened. A middle aged man walked in. The man was dressed in an off-the-rack suit, with a toupee that did not quite match his natural hair. He had a clipboard in his hands. “Good morning,” he said politely. “What shall I call you?” His English was quite good, but the trace of his Russian accent is unmistakable. A Muscovite, unless she missed her guess entirely. “I trust Sally Crenshaw is not actually your name.”

She had come with ID that claimed she was Sally Crenshaw. She had also been carrying her SHIELD ID, tucked in a belt under her clothes. This had not really been an undercover op. She had just been trying to demonstrate that her evidence trail had been good. Usually the SHEILD badge opened far more doors than it closed.

From the way she was tied to the bed, she could not tell if they had found the hidden belt or not. “Sally is fine,” she replied.

The doctor smiled at her. It was a smile that showed a mouth full of crooked teeth. “Well then, Sally. Would you care to explain what you were doing?”

“I was looking for the restroom. Did you know how hard it is to find a restroom in this place?”

He shook his head at her. “Surely you can come up with something better than that? You got through two levels of security and you changed your clothes since you came in the main door. What were you doing? Did Daniel send you? Are spying on my work?”

“Uh,” Natasha replied. “No. Could you please let me go? I have a bad back and these straps are hurting. And I really have to pee. Please just let me go and I will be on my way.”

The doctor pulled a stool from behind the bed and sat down facing her.

“Look,” Natasha said. “I have no idea who Daniel is. No one sent me. I was here to visit my aunt and I just took a wrong turn. Honestly.”

The doctor’s lips twitched as he shook his head. “Of course,” he said. He turned away from her and when he turned back he was holding the black wallet that contained her SHIELD credentials. “Could you explain to me why you had this, Ms. Romanov?”

He dropped it on the bed so it fell open. On one side was her badge, on the other side was her ID. With a sigh, Natasha dropped her head back against the bed. “I am investigating some thefts,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “I trust you have a warrant?”

“Are you Dr. Albert Latimer?”

“And what if I am?”

“I’d be curious to know what you are doing with akly-tetrocine-15.”

The doctor stood. “Is that what was stolen? It sounds dangerous.”

“You tell me. You are the doc.”

Standing near her, he reached out a hand and brushed her hair back from her face. His cool fingers brushed her cheek. “You really are some lovely work, you know that?”

“What does that mean?”

“You are Madame B’s design, no?”

Design. The word made her skin crawl, but she supposed it was accurate enough. She had been little more than a baby when they had taken her to the Red Room. Madam B had molded her into the woman she was now. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.

The doctor turned away from her and walked across the room, staring beyond the walls. “I saw the video of the way you reacted in the hall,” he mused. “It was breathtaking. Such grace. Such speed.”

She shifted her weight a tiny bit as she flexed her arms. The belt around her shoulders shifted up towards her shoulders. With each tiny movement she came a fraction of an inch closer to being able to wiggle out of the bottom of the belt. “Really,” he said. “Her work is the gold standard. If only I could get my compound correct.”

“That’s all very nice, but could you let me go? You found my badge. You really don’t want me to miss check in. My boss tends to overreact when his agents go missing.”

He laughed as he turned towards her. “I will show Madam B,” he said. “She may have failed me, but I will show her what I can do! I can create operatives that are every bit as glorious as you are.”

Natasha hunched her shoulders and that was it, the last bit she needed. She did not move, not yet. She needed to wait for him to turn his back again. “Tell me about this compound.”

He frowned at her. “Why? So you can tell Daniel?”

“I have no idea who Daniel is,” she insisted.

“You are lying,” he insisted. “SHIELD has him. He’s working for you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” he said, turning away. “You wouldn’t understand.”

And that was her opening. As soon as his back was turned she wriggled her shoulders free and started to unbuckle the straps around her legs. She must have made a noise because he turned back around. “What are you doing?” he demanded, rushing towards her.

He got too close. Her reaction was lighting fast. She got her legs free and scissored them around him. She put one leg on the back of his neck and with the other she kneed him in the stomach. With an explosive gasp as the air was forced out of him. He was bent over the bed. Using the backrest of the bed as leverage, she pulled her legs free and kicked with both feet. One leg landed on his head, the other on his ribs. He was thrown across the room, his body dangling and limp and he hit the wall hard. His head cracked on the white wall and leaving a smear of blood as he slid to the floor.

The whole thing happened so fast she didn’t have time to think about it. She swung her feet to the floor and hit the ground running, straight towards the door. 

****

Whatever this room was, it was not a cell. The door did not lock from the inside. The levered handle opened and she was back out in the hall. The alarm was blaring. From the end of the hall, guards were swarming out of a room. Before they could get their dart guns going, she ducked through one of the other doors, the one labelled “ward”.

She found herself in a large open space. In the center of the space was an operating table flanked with lights and trays. The perimeter of the room was lined with cells. Dozens of cells, with steel bars that started at the ceiling and sunk into the floor. She could see the inhabitants of several of the cells. They were children, dressed in white sweatsuits. Some had the gangly height of teenagers, others were barely waist high. Girl and boys. Skin colors ranging from albino to brown. There was no common factor in their appearance. The nurse that she had followed down the stairs was standing in a cluster with Dr. Washington and some other nurses.

One of the children, a boy with deep ochre skin and pale eyes, was staring right at her. When she met his eyes, she found herself inadvertently taking a step backwards. Her back hit the door she had come through with an audible thud. The boy started making a noise and as she looked around, the walls of bars filled up as children came to the front of their cells and stood and watched.

(Abruptly she remembered a moment when some administrator from Moscow had shown up to inspect the Red Room facility. He and his entourage had arrived at dawn, hours before their scheduled arrival. She had woken up, handcuffed to the bed, same as always. Around her, dozens of her classmates, her sisters, her competition, sat up as she did. Together they stared at the intruder with hostile, dangerous eyes.)

A buzzing sound brought her back to the present. The buzzing ended in a click as the cell doors unlocked. 

One by one the kids stepped out of their cells. They called to each other and high-fived. They smiled. Two small kids with freckles and matching bright red curly hair ran towards each other with their arms outstretched from opposite sides of the room. A ball appeared from somewhere, and a bald kid casually dribbled it between his legs a few times before passing it to another kid who had a birth mark that purpled half his face.

They seemed normal enough, except for the creepy way they were closing in on her and the odd physical characteristics some of them had. She turned back to the door. Maybe she could get out of here yet. From across the room, Dr. Washington called out, “David!”

She spun around just in time. A boy a few inches shorter than her charged. There was something about his proportions that seemed off. It was easy enough to sidestep him and redirect his momentum. He went sliding across the floor. Dr. Washington called out, “Janice!”. A girl who was maybe ten years old and ran with a limp came at her. She too was easily deflected.

“What are you doing?” she said to the kids. “You are going to get hurt!”

“Robert and Andrew!” The twin red heads who couldn’t be more than six came at her. “Come on!” she pleaded. “Stop it!” But the two children threw their bodies at her. One wrapped himself around her middle and the other grabbed her right arm and held. From the corner of her eye, she saw David get up.

She tried to peal the tiny redheads from her body, but they were surprisingly strong. Janice also got up. David and Janice stalked around her in a circle and suddenly, on some signal she did not see, they came at her together, one from each side.

She dislodged the kid on her arm with a violent shake. The tiny body went flying against the wall, hitting it with a thud. She couldn’t worry about that though. She twisted and landed kick in David’s midriff. He went down with a whoosh of air as the wind was knocked from his body. The weight of the red head clinging to her middle knocked her off balance and she stumbled and lost her footing. She ducked into a roll, but was unable to get back to her feet with the weight of the kid still clinging to her. Janice landed a solid kick on her torso while she was struggled.

Then there was another kid coming at her. She had to get off the floor. She grabbed the child wrapped around her middle by the chin and tore him away. She felts bones snap and his body went limp. Free of the weight, she rolled to her feet, vacating the spot where another kid was about to kick her.

She felt bones grate in her torso and each breath was like inhaling fire. That kick from Janice had broken a rib. Now the kids were coming at her, fast and furious. They were clumsy, novice fighters, but they were fast and strong and there were so many of them. Even when she hit them with full power, half the time they were back on their feet in seconds. She whirled and kicked and spun and punched.

And then no one was attacking her and she was standing in the middle of a circle of motionless bodies, haphazardly flung over each other. A hand reached out and brushed her ankle. It is one of the red haired twins. For a long moment, she stared at the child as the horror of what she had done hit her. She had just killed or maimed twenty or thirty children.

She did not have time for that. She could hear guards lining up in the hall, ready to come in. This time they would not be coming at her with darts. When she had started the fight with the kids, she had the door behind her back. During the fight she had moved out into the center of the room. Clearly going out the way she came in was not the best option. She noticed that on the floor, under the operating table, there was a grate and a drain. The grate was a two foot square. On the far side of the room there was an exit sign. Presumably that was where the nurses and Dr. Washington had disappeared during the fight.

Near the operating table, there were canisters of gas, some of which had red flammable stickers on them. The canisters were small, enough to provide a distraction.

She set her phone to play a recording of her voice. She pulled open the grate a crack and dropped her phone in. Then she knocked over the flammable container, breaking the stem from the metal bottle and releasing the gas. The sound of her voice filtering up from the floor was drowned out by the screaming hiss of the gas canisters.

She fled towards the far exit. She was at the door just as the guards entered from the other side. She took a knife she had picked up in the operating table area and flung it back, throwing for all she was worth. If she was lucky, the knife would spark on impact and the gas would ignite.

She did not wait to find out.

She was through the door and halfway up the stairs when the explosion rocked the building. She was knocked from her feet and she landed on the side of her injured rib. Plaster crumbs fell from the ceiling. Breathing shallowly, she scrambled up and kept going.

The stairs continue up into the hospital, but after one flight she came to a door with crash bars marked with an exit sign. She plowed through, out into the fall sunshine. She did not stop running. 

****Present****

“Well,” the Winter Soldier said. “That explains a lot.”

“What are you talking about?”

“SHIELD was not the only one who knew about that hospital and akly-tetrocine-15,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Hydra did not want anyone making super solider serum. At least, they did not want anyone who was not them, figuring it out.”

“Oh,” she said.

He said nothing.

“You were there?” she asked.

He nodded, staring straight ahead into the clouds. “My orders were to burn the place to the ground. Make it look like an accident.”

“Oh,” she said again.

“The fire started before I was ready. I had only finished setting the charges in one wing when it started to burn. I never could figure out what I had done wrong.”

“I started the fire,” Natasha said. “And what I thought would be a little fire that would burn itself out caught the accelerants.”

“Probably,” the Winter Soldier agreed.

They were silent until Natasha said, “I’m not going to tell Steve.”

The Winter Soldier looked at her and then he looked back down at the park.

“That girl,” he said. “She survived?”

Natasha looked back down at the park, but the park was emptying out and it seemed she was gone. “I broke her back in the fight,” Natasha said softly. “Whatever they had given her never healed that, but she recovered from the smoke inhalation and the burns and the eight other broken bones I gave her.” Natasha smiled grimly. “It was a miracle, that she survived.”

He laughed, bitterly. “A miracle,” he echoed.

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was pain and suffering for Natasha. I hope that the one thing that made her flinch from Pierce's list qualifies. :)


End file.
